Engagement program setup - 3 variables (persona, industry and stages)

[khushbooyadav]

We're trying to build an engagement program and we have 3 variables. We want to cater to the audiences based on persona as well as industry, as well as have it based on Awareness, Consideration, Evaluation. What's the best way to achieve this? 

We have segmentations setup for personas and the industry, but trying to understand if we should be splitting the setup into 3 separate engagement programs and how to best organize it.

Thanks!

[Michael_Florin]

Well, the question whether you have one program or three depends on whether you want people to be eligible to receive emails from one or three programs at the same time. A person can only be in one stream of one EP at a time, but in many EPs.

You have segmentations? Segmentations allow for dynamic content. Is that what you have in mind? One program, one string of emails per stream and the content added dynamically? Not super easy, I would say, as you have two segmentations to deal with, meaning you'll need to create a matrix and an hierarchy. 

Your stream transitions - Awareness, Consideration, Evaluation - should be determined by activity and not by your segmentations, I guess. Segmentations (or Smart Lists) should govern program entry, while email engagement creates stream transitions.

Forgive the loose thoughts. This is a pretty complex question and you might well need a few weeks to strategize all this.

[Vinay_Kumar]

Are you planning to use the same content for both audiences based on a persona as well as an industry? If yes, then you need to create an engagement program with three streams Awareness, Consideration, and Evaluation, and set the transition rules to change the streams based on the lead's activity. 

If you are planning to send different content, then you should go with 2 engagement programs with three streams Awareness, Consideration, and Evaluation, and set the transition rules to change the streams based on the lead's activity. 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Agreed with Michael’s recommendations here. One idea you can explore is to have separate programs for each persona and in each program set up streams for different stages and industries combo. I'm assuming that you'd have different content or at least a different order of the same content for each track. Having said that this is just one idea on how to pull this off, based on your requirement you can have a different setup too. If you want to create the email dynamic based on the segmentation membership, you can do it that way using a single engagement program too. Of course, you'd need to have separate streams for housing emails made dynamic made using each segmentation as you cannot add dynamic content based on multiple segmentation memberships. Lastly, in you want to create a bulletproof operational setup that ensures people always receive content from the right engagement program (in case of multiple engagement programs) and stream. Campaigns to add people to the correct EP, change stream within an EP, update the cadence to Paused state for the EP they aren’t eligible to receive the content from, apt transitions when the exhaust content in a stream, etc.

[Amanda_Reilly3]

If you're using segmentations to create dynamic emails based on Persona and Industry, just be aware that you cannot apply two segmentations to the same section of an email. If you want one module to be persona based and another module to be industry based, that's feasible, but the same module cannot be both. 

I agree with the previous statements - if you're hoping to send similar emails to all and use only one nurture, I would use streams based on stages with dynamic content. You can also use nested default programs with a send campaign to only send an email relevant to certain industries or persons if that's preferred, but I wouldn't rely on these for every email. 

I would also consider how you'd like to report on these - do you want to see how certain personas move through stages based on nurture engagement? Do you want to see if some industries are more engaged than others? Using dynamic content may be more difficult to report on some of these things.

I have seen Industry-based engagement programs, persona-based engagement programs, and stage-based engagement programs. The most important thing to focus on is what you think will be best for your audience, how you'd like to report on your efforts, and perhaps something of a nurture qualification manager/traffic director to ensure records are added to only one nurture at a time and the one the best suits them. 

[Katja_Keesom · Accepted solution]

Agree with all of the contributions so far. Combining all three variables into a single program sounds like a mighty complicated one to handle. Intuitively I would go for at least one variable defining three different programs. Some questions you could ask yourself in defining your strategy:

• Would any person qualify for more than one value for the three variables? Can they be two different personas or associated with more than one industry? Of course they can be in different stages for each of these combinations.
• What is the most logical way to organize your content sequence?
• What are the next steps you want people to take based on the nurturing in each phase?
• As aleady mentioned, what are the successes you want to be able to measure?

And you can define a few more along that same train of thought. Based on your input, a logical solution could be to create different engagement programs per industry, defining your streams along the lines of awareness, consideration, decision and for each email tailor the content with dynamic content to the different personas. And then indeed add an engagement hub to control which program(s) a person can be an active member of. But that is just an example and the best solution you can only determine by asking your internal team the right questions.